Is Virtual Reality The Future Of Field Trips?

Education -
I study K-12 education, including entrepreneurship and school choice.

When I lived in Northwest Arkansas, one of my favorite things to do was visit Crystal Bridges, possibly the finest museum of American art in the world. I would always linger for a minute next to Charles Wilson Peale’s massive portrait of George Washington. It is a striking work of art. President Washington stares right at you, offering a hint of a subtle smile, satisfied after victory at the Battle of Princeton. It was the first painting that patrons would see as they walked into the first exhibition hall. Their reactions were priceless.

Like clockwork, audible gasps would emerge. The painting is vivid and emotive and it elicited a real, physiological response from those who saw it. This appeared particularly true for folks that didn’t look like they got to visit a lot of art museums.

Research from student field trips to that museum found serious positive benefits. As it turns out, those gasps presaged gains in critical thinking, historical empathy, tolerance and interest in visiting museums again in children. I don’t doubt that if researchers had studied adults as well they would have found similar things. Actually being able to physically encounter works of art in beautiful and thoughtful situations appears to have a real, positive effect on people. What’s more, at least in the Crystal Bridges research, these benefits were more pronounced in students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Visitors try a virtual reality head-mounted headset Microsoft HoloLens during the Viva Technology show at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 25, 2018 in Paris, France. Viva Technology, the new international event brings together 5,000 startups with top investors, companies to grow businesses and all players in the digital transformation who shape the future of the internet. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)

But therein lies the rub. Not all students have such world-class facilities in their communities. Outside of a few major cities, access to classic works of art and historical artifacts is much more limited.

A novel solution is emerging to solve that very problem: virtual reality. If students cannot make it to the museum in person, perhaps a VR headset could bring the museum to them.

Google Expeditions offers a glimpse of what such a platform might look like. Within moments of downloading the app, I was inside the National Museum of Iraq. Even slotting my iPhone into a crude cardboard box and holding it up to my eyes immersed me in the museum and allowed me to focus in on details of ancient works of art that just wouldn’t be the same printed on the page of a book or played on a video over a projector. If I had a more sophisticated rig, I can only imagine how much more realistic it would feel.

Virtual reality can also take students to places that they could never go in person. There are explorations of the International Space Station, the Juno mission to Jupiter and the human respiratory system.

Besides the usual logistics questions, which may become less and less salient as smartphones proliferate and virtual reality technology gets cheaper, the real question I have is “does this get close enough to the real thing for kids to benefit?”

There is something about getting a permission slip signed, packing a sack lunch, piling onto a bus, trundling through unfamiliar streets, and descending on a museum or theatre like locusts that made the experience seem important and worthy of remembering. It was different than just another day in class or just another school activity. Can virtual reality replicate that? If it is used frequently in school, will it lose its luster? Can it ever truly match walking through those doors and seeing the ridges and blends of oil that make George Washington smile down on you? These are the questions that educators and researchers need to be asking.

While that important debate continues, there are ways to make field trips more accessible to more students. Booking field trips is a hassle. It can be a real pain for both teachers looking for a field trip to find out what is available, how much it costs, what logistical concerns need to be taken care of, and how to integrate what is available into what they are already teaching. It is a hassle for institutions as well. Managing the calendar, linking offerings to state standards or district curricula, and booking groups are all fraught with frictions and require time and money to do well.

One product looking to solve this problem is Explorable Places, which incubated for a time at Kansas City’s Lean Lab incubator (where I am a proud board member). Explorable Places is a kind of Airbnb for field trips, linking educators with available opportunities in their community. Currently, it is only up and running in Kansas City, New York and Denver, but one could see this working in cities and towns across the country. Teachers can have a much easier time finding what is out there. Institutions can have an easy platform to manage their reservations. Everybody wins.

Maybe before we go full bore into virtual reality, we should think about how we can improve access to current field trip opportunities. Virtual reality appears to offer much that can supplement those opportunities, but I would worry if it works too hard to replace them. It might very well wipe the smile off of George Washington’s face.

My new volume Failure Up Close: What Happens, Why It Happens, and What We Can Learn from it (edited with Jay Greene), is available here.